Konzerthaus Berlin: Konzerthaus Orchestra Berlin, Juraj Valcuha

A programme that takes the Konzerthausorchester from light to dark under its first guest conductor Juraj Valcuha: After the cheerful, at times folksonglike Third Symphony by 19-year-old Franz Schubert, which was written in 1815 for a private circle and probably premiered there, the 13th of the 15 symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich can be heard.

The first sentence of "Babi Jar" bears the name of a ravine near Kiev, where more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children of the SD, SS and Wehrmacht were murdered in 1941. This massacre was later concealed in the Soviet Union and offered political explosive material as the subject of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which at the same time accused anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

The premiere of the symphony took place under great pressure, after which a text change was ordered. The vocal part in this work is performed by the men's choir YL, with its full name Ylioppilaskunnan Laulajat, which was founded in 1883 as the oldest Finnish-speaking choir at the University of Helsinki.

from 24 - 26 January 2019
each at 20:00
in the Great Hall